Exploring the Role of Sound in Augmenting Visualization to Enhance User Engagement

Studies on augmenting visualization with sound are typically based on the assumption that sound can be complementary and assist in data analysis tasks. While sound promotes a different sense of engagement than vision, we conjecture that by augmenting non-speech audio to a visualization can not only help enhance the users' perception of the data but also increase their engagement with the data exploration process. We have designed a preliminary user study to test users' performance and engagement while exploring in a data visualization system under two different settings: visual-only and audiovisual. For our study, we used basketball player movement data in a game and created an interactive visualization system with three linked views. We supplemented sound to the visualization to enhance the users' understanding of a team's offensive/defensive behavior. The results of our study suggest that we need to better understand the effect of sound choice and encoding before considering engagement. We also find that sound can be useful to draw novice users' attention to patterns or anomalies in the data. Finally, we propose follow-up studies with designs informed by the findings from this study.